Advisor on Gender and Social Protection to former Vice President Dr Mahamudu Bawumia, Akosua Manu, has said Ghana’s worsening maternal mortality figures should compel the government to reconsider innovative healthcare interventions introduced to improve access and save lives.

In a Facebook post reacting to the Ghana Health Service report that 965 Ghanaian women died from pregnancy-related complications in 2025, Manu described the figure as one that should “stop an entire nation in its tracks.”

“965. That’s how many Ghanaian women died from pregnancy-related complications in 2025 alone. Mothers. Daughters. Wives. Sisters. Women who walked into our health system carrying life and never walked back out,” she wrote.

She said the situation was particularly troubling because Ghana under the erstwhile administration had already deployed innovations designed to make healthcare delivery more accessible, responsive and capable of saving lives.

Manu cited the medical drone delivery programme, launched in Ghana in 2019 through a partnership with Zipline and strongly championed by Dr Bawumia, as one such intervention.

According to her, Dr Bawumia understood that effective healthcare delivery went beyond hospitals and medical personnel and required attention to “time, access and technology.”

“By championing Zipline, he placed the value of human lives ahead of the narrow calculation of cost, recognising that when a mother is haemorrhaging, the most expensive intervention is the one that arrives too late,” she stated.

She pointed to a peer-reviewed study involving 191 health facilities in the Ashanti Region which found a **56.4 per cent reduction in maternal deaths at facilities served by drones**, alongside increases in antenatal visits and facility deliveries.

Manu argued that the medical drone programme should therefore be viewed as part of a broader effort to address weaknesses in Ghana’s healthcare system, particularly the difficulty of getting critical medical supplies such as blood and emergency medicines to facilities quickly.

She also linked the maternal deaths to the government's inability to complete the Agenda 111 projects, another intervention championed under the Akufo-Addo administration, arguing that it could have helped reduce the number of deaths recorded.

While Zipline used technology to move critical supplies rapidly to health facilities, she said Agenda 111 sought to bring healthcare infrastructure physically closer to underserved communities.

“Ghana needs a health system that is both physically accessible and technologically enabled. We need functioning hospitals in underserved communities, but we also need the technology and logistics to ensure those hospitals have the blood, medicines and other supplies required when emergencies arise,” Manu wrote.

She expressed concern over the reported disruption of the drone programme and the continued non-operation of several Agenda 111 projects, arguing that political considerations should not determine the fate of interventions capable of improving healthcare outcomes.

“If there are real problems with the cost or management of Zipline, fix them. If there are problems with Agenda 111, resolve them and complete the hospitals. If there is something better, show us and deploy it,” she said.

Manu maintained that healthcare interventions should be assessed on their effectiveness rather than the political identity of those who introduced them.

She said the 965 maternal deaths should serve as a wake-up call for Ghana to preserve what works, improve what does not and build on proven healthcare innovations.

She concluded that politics must not take precedence over healthcare outcomes, asking: “Why kill what worked?”